Research Platforms

We've built a number of hardware systems we use in our research.

Bluehive

Bluehive is a multi-FPGA compute cluster targeted at scientific
simulations with demanding communication requirements. Bluehive is designed
to be extensible with a reconfigurable communication topology suited to
algorithms with demanding high-bandwidth and low-latency communication,
something which is unattainable with commodity GPGPUs and CPUs.

Conceived to easily scale to 64 FPGAs, we've built one box of 16 FPGAs so far.
Each FPGA is an Altera Stratix IV 230GX, on a Terasic DE4 evaluation board
with up to 8GB DDR2 RAM. We use the many high-speed transceivers on the FPGAs to provide massive
bandwidth at low latency - each board has 12x 6Gbps bidirectional links
giving a total box bandwidth of 1.5Tbps while holding 128GB RAM. To achieve this economically we
designed and open-sourced a PCIe-SATA breakout
board
which we use to provide repluggable connections to experiment with different
network topologies.

Bluehive is used for the BIMPA project to do
massively-parallel neural network computation, and also for distributed
processor design over multiple FPGAs.

CHERIcloud

CHERIcloud is a custom server comprising 7 FPGA-based nodes, designed for the
CTSRD and MRC2
projects. Each node is a Terasic DE4 board that runs the
CHERI 64-bit MIPS processor
and the full FreeBSD UNIX operating system, each board
connecting to the internet via gigabit ethernet. CHERIcloud is used as a cloud
server to give external developers access to the CheriBSD environment.

DE4 Tablet

The DE4 Tablet is a portable FPGA computer, capable of implementing one
slice of Bluehive or CHERIcloud in a mobile format. It has a battery,
touchscreen and HDMI output sufficient to give presentations and demos
directly from the FPGA.